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LHP: THE POWER OF MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM 
RHP: TURNING THE TABLES 
 
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4 
Turning the Tables 
Polanyi’s Critique of Free Market Utopianism 
In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman (1991), identifies three distinct “rhetorics” that 
conservatives have used to discredit reform movements since the French Revolution. Chapter 6 
of this volume is devoted to the “rhetoric of perversity”—the claim that a reform will have 
exactly the opposite of its intended effects and will hurt the intended beneficiaries. The second, 
“the rhetoric of jeopardy” is exemplified by Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (2007 
[1944]); it is the claim that a reform will erode the freedoms we depend on. Hirschman’s third is 
the “rhetoric of futility”—the insistence that a reform is literally impossible because it goes 
against everything that we know is natural about human beings and social arrangements. This is 
the ploy that Malthus used in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1992 [1798]) to challenge 
the egalitarian ideas of William Godwin. Malthus professed to admire the beauty of Godwin’s 
vision, but he ultimately dismissed the vision as impossible. It was futile because Malthus 
declared it to be against the laws of nature—in other words, utopian. 
 The rhetoric of futility is the main weapon that conservative intellectuals have wielded 
against socialists and communists for more than two centuries. They contend that an egalitarian 
social order would destroy any incentives for effort and creativity, which makes it utterly 
inconsistent with human nature. But while these arguments are open to debate, there is one 
aspect of the right’s critique that has proven compelling. This is the claim put forward by Marx 
and Engels and other theorists of the left that ending the class power of the bourgeoisie would 
also bring an end to political conflicts and the exercise of political power. As Sheldon Wolin 
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(1960) and others have noted, a deep hostility to politics led socialist thinkers to imagine 
mistakenly that it was possible to escape the necessity of governmental and political power. 
 One neglected aspect of Karl Polanyi’s thought is his showing the parallels between market 
liberalism and Marxism with respect to their utopian views of state power. They both disdain it 
and imagine that it is possible to escape from governance and political constraint, and they both 
prioritize the economy as the central organizing force in society. To be sure, they differ in their 
normative evaluation of the economy. Economic liberalism celebrates the absolute freedom of 
unfettered markets as the means to transform politics into a purely technical exercise of 
maintaining optimal market conditions. Marxism, of course, associates the capitalist economy 
not with freedom for all but with unfreedom for most, but it upholds the redemptive powers of a 
stateless socialist economy. 
 There is certainly nothing novel about arguments that Marxism is utopian. Where Polanyi is 
utterly original is in his startling claim that the self-regulating market—the central precept of free 
market doctrine—is a utopian idea. A self-regulating market, according to Polanyi, has never and 
will never exist, making its prescriptive demands for societal reorganization wholly futile. Years 
before Hirschman’s typology of conservative rhetorics, Polanyi mobilized the rhetoric of futility 
against free market thinking. 
 Another indication of the prescience of Polanyi’s rhetorical move was that Friedrich 
Hayek—arguably the thinker most central to the revival of free market ideas in the twentieth 
century—openly embraced utopianism just a few years after the publication of The Great 
Transformation (hereafter GT). In a 1949 University of Chicago Law Review essay entitled “The 
Intellectuals and Socialism,” Hayek proposed his own sociology of knowledge to explain why so 
many intellectuals had come to embrace socialism. His argument is that, notwithstanding the 
impracticality of socialism: “… theirs has become the only explicit general philosophy of social 
policy held by a large group, the only system or theory which raises new problems and opens 
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new horizons, that they have succeeded in inspiring the imagination of the intellectuals.” 
Moreover, the socialists have been able to drive political debate continually to the left by 
contrasting the status quo to the ideal world of the socialist utopia. 
 Hayek asserts of his fellow market liberals, “What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program 
which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a 
truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the 
trade unions), which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what 
appears today as politically possible.” He goes on to say: “The main lesson which the true 
[market] liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be 
Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public 
opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote.” (Hayek 1949, 
432-433.) [ So, in fact, Hayek and his Mont Pelerin colleagues proceeded through the 1950s, 
1960s, and 1970s to follow this counsel and repackage market liberalism as a utopia. Rather than 
proposing mild and incremental reforms, they called for radical new measures to overturn what 
they saw as the drift towards socialism. And just as the socialist utopia had been grounded in a 
deep moral commitment to equality, the market liberals rooted their utopia in constant appeals to 
expanding personal liberty. And lo and behold, Hayek was vindicated; free market ideas made 
deep inroads among Western intellectuals.
1
 
<A>The Elements of Utopia 
Ever since Thomas More first coined the term, utopian thinking has been linked with the 
unrealistic starry-eyed idealism of radical and socialist philosophers who, against all evidence, 
insist on the achievability of what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines as “an 
impossibly ideal scheme … a place, state, or condition ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, 
customs, and conditions.” In light of this association between utopia and anti-capitalist 
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movements, how does Polanyi justify attributing an unattainable perfectionism to classical and 
neoclassical economics? Economics is the discipline, after all, that consistently played a major 
role in defeating even the tamest of progressive reforms, using its self-confident claims to 
scientific foundations to accuse movements for social justice of “utopianism.” 
 To make his intellectual turnabout even more paradoxical, Polanyi makes Robert Owen the 
hero of GT. Robert Owen was the early nineteenth century English industrialist turned 
philanthropist, socialist philosopher, and architect of the first cooperative industrial village (New 
Lanark, Scotland). He has long been held up as the poster child for nineteenth century 
utopianism. Yet Polanyi insists that Owen is the realist, for it is he who recognized that it is both 
necessary and right for government to intervene in the economy. Malthus and Ricardo, Polanyi 
insists, are the true utopians, notwithstanding the fact that Thomas Carlyle labeled their political 
economy as the “dismal science” because of its gloomy predictions about future wage levels and 
thedisasters that would inevitably be wrought by overpopulation. A century of political 
economy’s disciplinary development changed little in Polanyi’s estimation. No less than Malthus 
and Ricardo, he applied the same label of utopianism to von Mises and Hayek rather than the 
communists and socialists that they vilified in Vienna. 
 To get a deeper understanding of Polanyi’s meaning and motivation, we turn to the passage 
that comes right after he first labels the self-regulating market as a “stark utopia”: “… such an 
institution [a self-regulating market] could not exist for any length of time without annihilating 
the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and 
transformed his surroundings into a wilderness” (GT, 3). Polanyi insists that the free market 
utopia is not a harmless fantasy; he is blunt and graphic in characterizing its consequences as 
producing a dystopia—“a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, 
disease, and overcrowding:”
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 To understand why and how Polanyi predicts this inevitable slide from utopia to dystopia, it 
is useful to return to and deconstruct the OED’s characterization of utopianism as an “impossibly 
ideal scheme for the amelioration or perfection of social conditions.” Parsing this carefully, we 
can divide its conception of utopia into three distinct parts—it is an “ideal” of social 
“perfection,” it is a “scheme” to achieve amelioration or perfection, and it is a tragic 
“impossibility.” 
<A>The Utopian Ideal 
Free-market doctrine is an ideology founded on three assumptions—that power resides 
exclusively in the state, that political power is a chronic threat to freedom and commerce, and 
that the economic sphere does not entail the exercise of power. It is the dream of eliminating the 
need for political power or government that makes these assumptions utopian. Governance and 
societal order is now left exclusively to the putatively noncoercive workings of the self-
regulating market (Hirschman 1977). Indeed, it is the absence of political power that they see as 
the precondition for individual liberties, societal prosperity, and the freest of all possible worlds. 
 Polanyi rejects these assumptions and the normative ideal of a world without power. For 
him, no society is possible without political power and constraint (GT, 266). He shows 
historically how government policies and the explicit use of compulsion are necessary to 
construct and maintain markets. But he pushes the analysis to a more profound philosophical 
level by asking why anybody would think it desirable in the first place to minimize the role of 
the state while maximizing the reliance on market self-regulation. His explanation centers on 
“social naturalism,” a foundational tenet of classical political economy and modern market 
fundamentalism. Social naturalism is a way of viewing the world built on the assumption that the 
laws governing natural phenomena also govern human society. Social naturalism can be 
distinguished from naturalism—the methodological postulate that, because nature and society 
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exhibit the same kinds of regularities, there should be a unified method applicable to both. Social 
naturalism, by contrast, insists that society is governed by those natural laws rather than by 
institutional rules and social rationalities. For social naturalism, society is not “like” the natural 
world; the social and natural worlds are one and the same and are subject to the same laws and 
exigencies. Social naturalism conceptually subordinates society to nature, and society is seen as 
regulated by natural laws in the same way as falling objects and the evolution of species. 
 Social naturalism realigns the traditional Enlightenment view of human rationality. It blurs 
the line between humans and animals by first and foremost defining people as biological beings 
motivated by the instinctive drives to eat and reproduce. Against the rationalist belief that 
political intervention can alleviate social problems, social naturalism makes scarcity, poverty, 
distress, and famine inexorable. In the views of Malthus, nature necessitates an endless struggle 
for scarce resources, but when nature is left to its own devices, it creates a perfect balance of 
supply and demand. When humans finally abandon the folly and futility of trying to impose their 
own will over nature, they will find that while not always benign, nature is always a wise 
governor. “Man” cannot reason with nature because it is nature’s utter indifference to reason that 
distinguishes it from humanity. 
 The roots of social naturalism can be traced to Joseph Townsend’s apocryphal fable about 
the struggle for survival between goats and dogs on a Pacific island—two originally sparring 
species that eventually learned to live in harmony only because there was no political 
interference with the natural condition of scarcity. Polanyi captures the link between social 
naturalism and government policy in memorable prose: “Hobbes had argued the need for a 
despot because men were like beasts; Townsend insisted that they were actually beasts and that, 
precisely for that reason … [n]o government was needed to maintain this balance; it was restored 
by the pangs of hunger on the one hand, the scarcity of food on the other” (GT, 119). 
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 Since the human poor are biologically indistinguishable from the goats and the dogs, and 
thus subject to the same laws of nature, their survival should likewise be left to the wisdom of 
nature without the Poor Law’s artificial removal of natural scarcity. Society, as fundamentally 
biological, is a self-regulating system that when untouched by political intervention will tend 
toward equilibrium and order: “Essentially, economic society was founded on the grim realities 
of Nature; if man disobeyed the laws which ruled that society, the fell executioner would strangle 
the offspring of the improvident. The laws of a competitive society were put under the sanction 
of the jungle” (GT, 131). 
 While talk of social naturalism may sound alien to our contemporary political discourse, it 
is an essential part of free market utopianism. Without social naturalism, there could be no 
rhetoric about a self-adjusting market regulated by its own natural laws and market societies 
capable of self-governing without a meddlesome government. Social naturalism is also the 
foundation for the utopian belief in the self-regulating market’s benign system of incentives that 
operate freely without the exercise of power. Social naturalism underlies the market-state binary 
with its privileging of the market and its insistence that these must be separate and autonomous 
realms. 
 While Mirowski and Plehwe (2009, 435) advance a different view than ours about the 
relation between the classical economists and twentieth century market fundamentalists, they 
acknowledge that Hayek, Friedman, and their allies “… did agree that for purposes of public 
understanding and sloganeering, market society must be treated as a ‘natural’ and inexorable 
state of humankind” [emphasis in original]. One reason they did is that social naturalism is the 
source of one of the most powerful political weapons of market fundamentalism—the perversity 
thesis (Hirschman 1991). [ Founded on social naturalism, the perversity thesis holds that the 
“normal” or “natural” state of the market is an equilibrium of self-adjustment. The perversity 
thesis—or the “perverse-effects doctrine”—holds that any public policy aiming to change market 
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outcomes, such as prices or wages or inequality, automatically becomes a noxious interference 
with nature’s equilibrating processes. Much stronger than talk of random “unintended effects,” 
the perversity thesis makes perverse outcomes inescapable; the very measures intended for good 
inevitably will leave the world in a worse shape than prevailed before any “reform” had been 
instituted (Hirschman 1991). We revisit in Chapters 5 and 6 the battle over the English Poor 
Laws which were a precursor to struggles over modern welfare benefits. 
 Malthus was only the first of a long line to successfully turn the perversity doctrine into a 
full-scale political campaign to remove or prohibit government initiated regulations, reforms, and 
interventions. In the 1880s, Herbert Spencer amplified his attacks on an enlarged franchise with 
the claim that “uninstructed legislators have in past times continually increased human suffering 
in their endeavors to mitigate it” (Spencer 1940 [1881]). Von Mises reprised the doctrine by 
articulating the free market opposition to unemployment benefits. He argued that if benefits 
provide livelihoods to the jobless, they will have an incentive not to seek employment but rather 
to comfortably adjust to a new found leisure (Dale 2008, 512). Finally, Milton Friedman 
perfected one of the most popular uses of the perversity thesis in his claim that setting a 
minimum wage induces unemployment and drives down all wages: “Minimum wage laws are 
about as clear a case as one can find of a measure the effects of which are precisely the opposite 
of those intended by the men of good will who support it” (Friedman 1962, 180).] Friedman’s 
more popular writings show that behind all of the modern bells and whistles of the Chicago 
School, their policy argument rely on the same social naturalist-inspired perversity thesis that 
Malthus elaborated at the end of the 18th century. 
 At the level of ideology, free market utopianism’s promise of a society organized 
exclusively by the laws of nature eliminates altogether the need for political power to structure or 
govern human society. In reality, however, the elites who embraced political economy in 
Malthus’s era had no intention of abandoning control over the populace. Their motivation was to 
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eliminate only the protective social policies that interfered with the poor’s full exposure to the 
labor market. With the exception of the socially protective role of the state, they freely used 
political power to reinforce the logic of markets. To obfuscate this selective anti-statism, free-
market utopianism tells a story about how the market’s natural mechanisms will not only make 
for economic prosperity; it will also take over the work too important to trust to government such 
as providing social order and protecting individual liberty, all without exerting power. After all, 
if the natural and the social world are organized by the same laws of nature, and these laws are 
always preferable to the potential tyranny of arbitrary political will, then not just the economic 
but also the governing functions of society would be better served by the market. 
 For Polanyi, the idea of a society free of power is an impossible deceit; it is based on the 
false claim that, in contrast to government, markets and economic relationships are free of the 
exercise of power. It is utopian not merely because of the idea that society did not need political 
power; rather it was in the conceit that the market, by contrast, is a site free of power. To 
characterize it as such plainly reveals free-market utopianism’s bias in favor of a definite kind of 
power. 
<B>Utopianism as a Planned Project 
Classical political economy staked its appeal not only on the fanciful utopianism of social 
naturalism’s world without power. It also justified its defense of a laissez-faire economy by 
telling a story about how the historical development of the market economy in the nineteenth 
century was an entirely natural, spontaneous, and unplanned phenomenon: “Their [economic 
liberals] whole social philosophy hinges on the idea that laissez-faire was a natural development” 
(GT, 148). Whereas markets as places of barter and exchange had long existed as elements of all 
societies, Polanyi’s well-known argument is that these were historically always embedded within 
and regulated by the larger system of social relations. Nineteenth century political economy 
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claimed that the transformation of these isolated local markets into one big, national market 
economy was the natural result of their innate tendencies to expand. This was seen as the 
inevitable result of the even more basic instinctive trait of human nature to barter and exchange. 
 Classical political economy insists that ever-expanding unregulated markets are the natural 
condition of society, and—were they left to flourish without interference—the prosperity brought 
on by self-regulating market economies would be a constant of history. A series of corruptions in 
the form of perverse political and legal interventions blocked this happy outcome. Examples 
include the efforts of the Tudor monarchy to slow down the enclosure movement and the milder 
but equally damaging laws restricting the movement of labor. History, according to this view, 
entails an epic battle on the part of social naturalists to undo the “collectivist” perversions of 
political power that interfere with the otherwise spontaneous and natural working of markets. 
The eventual arrival of laissez-faire and a market economy in the early nineteenth century was 
not an act of politics or law; it was rather the belated restoration of the natural. 
 The reality is that political economy was a grand and calculated scheme for the state to 
actively remake contained and regulated markets into a coordinated self-regulating market 
society. The irony of this particular utopian scheme is that it violates the very essence of the 
social naturalist ideal. Not only were laissez-faire and the free market not natural but planned; 
they were, as we discussed earlier, operationalized by political interventions: “… laissez-faire 
economy was the product of deliberate State action” (GT, 147). Revealing the historical planning 
at the heart of the free market utopia undermines both its social naturalist self-representation and 
its mantle of spontaneity. It also lays bare once again the hypocritical conceit at its core. The 
zealotry against the use of state power was selectively conceived and applied. The self-regulating 
market abhorred and challenged state intervention when it came to aiding the poor. For the 
government to alleviate poverty artificially was to use power in the abuse of nature. But there 
was no hesitation whatsoever to use powerful instruments of government coercion to create a 
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new legal regime that enforced the logic of markets. Polanyi thus disposes of the fiction that 
market economies are natural. The market fundamentalist world without power lived exclusively 
in the utopian ideology of social naturalism. 
 Nor, moreover, was political power a onetime exercise in jump-starting a market economy, 
only to give way to the natural workings of the market once it was nicely humming away. The 
market was never and can never actually be disembedded. Political power is a constitutive 
element at the heart of any functioning market; it could no more be removed than could the price 
mechanism. The question is never whether the economy is politically embedded, but what kinds 
of political interventionsare used and to whose benefit do they operate. Despite the utopian 
ideal’s anti-statist zealotry, the irony is that political power is the necessary mechanism to 
maintain and creatively adjust the institutional conditions that maintain the appearance of a free-
market: “The introduction of free markets, far from doing away with the need for control, 
regulation, and intervention, enormously increased their range. Thus even those who wished 
most ardently to free the state from all unnecessary duties, and whose whole philosophy 
demanded the restriction of state activities, could not but entrust the self-same state with the new 
powers, organs, and instruments required for the establishment of laissez-faire” (GT, 146–147). 
 
While it is political power and legislative coercion that exercises the actual heft in this planning 
process, the ideational scheme is the driving force that leads that power. The market is not only 
politically “always embedded”; it is always ideationally embedded (as we argue in Chapter 6 
below). Ideational embeddedness, once again, helps us understand how major transformations 
are ideationally driven. Put slightly differently, it is the ideas that have causal powers. Polanyi 
was far ahead of his time in recognizing the central role that the new ideas of social science 
played in this process. “Social not technical invention was the intellectual mainspring of the 
industrial revolution. The decisive contribution of the natural sciences to engineering was not 
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made until a full century later, when the industrial revolution was long over…. The triumphs of 
natural science had been theoretical in the true sense, and could not compare in practical 
importance with those of the social sciences of the day” (GT, 124). 
 Then, almost as if anticipating how today’s academics would react, he remarks wryly: 
“… unbelievable though it may seem to our generation, the standing of natural science greatly 
gained by its connection with the humane sciences. The discovery of economics was an 
astounding revelation which hastened greatly the transformation of society and the establishment 
of a market system…. It was thus both just and appropriate than not the natural but the social 
sciences should rank as the intellectual parents of the mechanical revolution which subjected the 
powers of nature to man.” (GT, 124–125.) Polanyi here is insisting that economic theories and 
social science models do not represent and generalize already existing economic entities but 
rather make markets, economic practices, and indeed entire market societies. Today, there are 
new theoretical paradigms that follow Polanyi’s path-breaking understanding of the causal 
powers of economic theories, especially the theory of “performativity” associated with the 
sociologists Michel Callon and Donald Mackenzie (Callon 1998; MacKenzie 2006; MacKenzie, 
Muniesa, and Su, eds. 2007). 
<B>Utopianism as Tragedy 
Even if utopian dreams are ultimately unrealizable if a society is to survive, Polanyi warns us 
that attempting to achieve the unachievable produces dystopian consequences. The horrors of 
early industrialization included dark Satanic mills, children maimed and disfigured from sixteen-
to eighteen-hour workdays, and the squalor and filth of early industrial cities. The misguided 
dream of economic liberals to restore the gold standard after World War I produced a global 
depression that generated fascism and a second world war. And the last thirty years of market 
fundamentalism has now produced another dystopian global calamity—a nearly catastrophic 
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financial collapse and a global recession that has thrown millions out of work and increased 
hunger and misery in every corner of the globe. But how does Polanyi connect these social 
tragedies to the utopian project? His answer is not simply that the “best laid plans” will always 
have unexpected and unintended consequences. It is a more specific argument that the particular 
utopian ideal of a self-regulating market creates a dystopian nightmare. The key link is his 
conception of “fictitious commodities.” 
 Polanyi argues that to create a self-regulating market economy, labor, land, and money must 
all be subjected to market mechanisms. Polanyi calls these the nucleus of a culture “formed by 
human beings, their natural surroundings, and productive organizations” (GT, 170). Labor and 
land are “no other than the human beings themselves of which every society consists and the 
natural surroundings in which it exists.” Since commodities are things that are produced to be 
bought and sold on the market, none of these three vital social entities are true commodities. To 
include these fictitious commodities in the market mechanism means to subordinate the 
substance of society itself to the laws of the market. Polanyi argues that this theoretical sleight of 
hand places human society at risk as it threatens to annihilate the human relationships on which 
society rests. 
 Very much like Durkheim (1964 [1893]), Polanyi identifies the noncontractual foundations 
of contract as necessary not only for markets but for human communities to thrive, not least 
because the humans who are expected to participate in markets are incapable of performing any 
labor without a life-enhancing social environment and access to “social goods” such as clean air 
and water, safe working conditions, education, and medical care. In its rush to transform labor 
into a true commodity, market fundamentalism systematically undermines these noncontractual 
foundations on which human society depends. The tragedy of this is most obvious in the case of 
turning human beings into labor, which Polanyi says is “only another name for a human activity 
which goes with life itself” (GT, 75). 
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 In the early years of England’s Industrial Revolution, men, women, and children were for 
the first time treated as commodities subject only to buying and selling on markets. To become 
commodities, they must be subjected to the “free labor contract,” which requires they be ripped 
away from their prior attachments to families, cultures, and communities. In discussing the 
process of early marketization in England, Polanyi writes: “[Marketization] was best served by 
the application of the principle of freedom of contract. In practice this meant that the 
noncontractual organizations of kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed were to be 
liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and thus restricted his freedom. To 
represent this principle as one of noninterference, as economic liberals are wont to do, was 
merely the expression of an ingrained prejudice in favor of a definite kind of interference, 
namely, such as would destroy noncontractual relations between individuals and prevent their 
spontaneous reformation” (GT, 171). 
 When rural industry in southern England collapsed in the eighteenth century, thousands of 
displaced workers were expected to simply relocate to another village, another city, another 
region, or even another continent to find work. Some economists argue that the mass 
displacement brought with it higher wages, thus making it uniformly advantageous for the 
working class. Polanyi responds to this dubious claim by illustrating in grim detail that social 
livelihoods cannot be reduced to material quantification. The Industrial Revolution was a cultural 
catastrophe that stripped people of the social and cultural supports on which they relied: “The 
human degradation of the laboring classes under early capitalism was the result of a social 
catastrophe not measurable ineconomic terms” (GT, 302). Indeed, he frequently makes the 
analogy between this early English cultural catastrophe and the devastating consequences on 
indigenous communities during the European colonization of Africa and Asia: “The catastrophe 
of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic 
institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether 
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relevant). These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is forced upon 
an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into commodities, which, 
again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an 
organic society” (GT, 167). 
 But even under less extreme circumstances, treating labor as a pure commodity has tragic 
consequences. It strips people of protection from the periodic bouts of unemployment that are an 
inevitable consequence of the down phase of the business cycle. It leaves people hungry and 
unable to feed their families while they are waiting for employers to once again be interested in 
their services. And workers who are disabled or ill are simply discarded like any other defective 
commodity. 
 Over the last thirty years of market fundamentalism in the United States, the same 
undermining of noncontractualized social life has occurred. Under the influence of Milton 
Friedman, a conscious policy of tax cutting has been a principle method of attack (Block 2009). 
This strategy has been given a name—“starving the beast” (Somers 2008, 93–95). It is so dubbed 
because, as tax cuts inexorably increase government deficits, campaigns are suddenly mobilized 
to balance budgets by waging ideological combat against “excess spending.” But once again, 
note the selectivity of the anti-statism: the label of excess spending is applied only to social 
expenditures that support working and middle class people. In the U.S., where the individual 
states provide many of the critically important protections and public goods, this strategy has 
proved devastatingly effective. Even after the election of Barack Obama indicated a shift in 
national mood, state governments—constitutionally required to balance budgets—have engaged 
in round after round of intense budgetary austerity. 
 From a Polanyian perspective, the tragic consequences of financial commodification were 
also predictable. Although it was the financial elite and their political accomplices that pushed 
the economy over the cliff, the Great Recession took its worst toll on the poor, the middle, and 
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the working classes as unemployment soared. Among the rich Western countries, residents of the 
United States bear especially painful consequences, as state governments one after the other have 
eliminated or drastically reduced what little is left of the nation’s social safety net. Europeans, 
we are reminded, do not lose their health care when they lose their jobs: “[Americans] [] find 
themselves with essentially no support once their trivial unemployment check has fallen off. We 
[Americans] have nothing underneath. When Americans lose their jobs, they fall into the abyss. 
That does not happen in other advanced countries, it does not happen, I want to say, in civilized 
countries” (Krugman 2009a). 
 This is free-market utopianism’s tragic denouement. When social goods are defunded by 
governments, health, education, and personal safety become accessible only to those who can 
pay. The result is the “liquidation” of a community’s noncontractual foundations. The poor and 
minorities have long been subject to this kind of strategic defunding of social support. Somers 
(2008, ch.2) recounts the example of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a recent 
tragic demonstration of this process. She conceptualizes this development as the 
contractualization of citizenship. Citizenship represents a bundle of rights and obligations, 
especially the rights to those noncontractual supports necessary for full and equal social 
inclusion in civil society (Marshall 1964 [1950]).] These rights are the legal glue that binds civil 
society’s noncontractual foundations to its people. They are the necessary elements for the 
essential freedoms and “capabilities” (Sen 1999) that people require to live as equal members of 
society. For all but the wealthy, government-provided rights to protection against illness, for 
education and literacy, for freedom from hunger and want, are the only hope for any semblance 
of moral equality. When these social goods are contractualized, they become subject to the rules 
of quid pro quo market exchange, rules that demand something of equivalent value in exchange 
for social citizenship rights. They are thus no longer rights but conditional privileges, only 
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available to those who have something to exchange that the market deems of equivalent value, 
usually money or labor (Somers 2008, ch.2). 
 Hurricane Katrina shows us what happens to those who have nothing of sufficient market 
value to exchange for what are now privileges. The indifferent response of government at all 
levels shows what happens to whole communities without the kind of resources that qualifies as 
worthy of contractual exchange. Quite simply, when the rights to social goods dissolve, so too do 
the rights to inclusion. People are literally cut loose from membership in the broader civil 
society. Once excluded, they no longer are granted the recognition by others as moral equals; 
they become superfluous and disposable (Uchitelle 2006). As we watched the tragedy of 
Hurricane Katrina unfold over the course of days, weeks, now years, the status of the largely 
African-American impoverished population of New Orleans as a superfluous and disposable 
people was painfully and shamefully exhibited. No social tableau has better publicized the tragic 
consequences of commodifying human beings and contractualizing their noncontractual 
relationship—especially that between government and the people. Hurricane Katrina shows us in 
extremis what thirty years of free-market utopianism looks like; once having been witnessed, no 
one can claim ignorance of its inexorably tragic endings (Somers 2008, ch.2). 
 Polanyi was equally visionary with respect to the second of his fictitious commodities, as he 
anticipated the dangers that exist with the full commodification of land and nature. For nature to 
be commodified into property, human habitat must be carved up into parcels; if there are profits 
to be earned, some of those parcels will end up suffering the most extreme environmental 
degradation. When agriculture ceases to be a way of life and becomes simply a profit-making 
activity, entire populations can find themselves at risk for starvation because market signals had 
suggested that the land was better suited for raising industrial raw materials than food. Today 
commodifying nature has extended to a degree that promises planetary annihilation through 
radical climate change. 
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 Finally, we should not be surprised to learn that Polanyi’s designation of money as the third 
fictitious commodity helps us to make sense of the financial market economic meltdown of 
2007–2008. When the production of money and credit is left entirely to the banking system, it is 
practically guaranteed that banks and other financial institutions will recklessly multiply the 
supply of credit in search of higher and higher profits, putting the economy at risk of a 
devastatingcrash when investors suddenly lose confidence. This is what drove the severe boom 
and bust cycles of nineteenth century market societies and ultimately led to strong central banks 
and regulations designed to place limits on the ability of financial intermediaries to carry out 
unsustainable expansions of the supply of credit. 
 During the recent reign of market fundamentalism in the United States, most of these 
restraints on the ability of financial intermediaries to expand the supply of credit were 
systematically dismantled. Seeing the possibility of previously unimaginable profits, financial 
actors used the efficient markets hypothesis to create a finance-knows-best regulatory climate. 
This included the dramatic expansion of new financial intermediaries, including hedge funds and 
private equity funds, that were largely exempted from any regulatory oversight. Under the 
eighteen-year reign of Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve, the government continued to 
systematically relax the rules for the largest financial institutions that allowed them to hold 
substantial liabilities in “off balance sheet entities” and to expand exponentially their ratio of 
debts to assets. The predictable consequence was that when the inevitable rush by investors to 
safety finally came, virtually the entire financial system faced insolvency. Only government 
lending at a previously unimagined level averted a complete financial collapse (Skidelsky 2009; 
Wessel 2009). 
 Free market utopianism’s effort to govern society by the laws of supply and demand 
inevitably subverts necessary forms of social protection and embeddedness. Precisely for this 
reason, institutions emerged in the course of the nineteenth century to protect society from the 
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dangers of treating nature, labor, and money as if they were actually true commodities. Critics of 
free-market utopianism understood that government is the only institution capable of regulating 
the supply and demand of these fictitious commodities. Policies were set in place that allowed 
governments to manage shifting demands for employees by providing relief in periods of 
unemployment, by educating and training future workers, and by influencing migration flows.
3
 
With respect to land and our natural environment, governments maintained continuity of food 
production by insulating farmers from the pressures of fluctuating harvests and volatile prices, 
and they regulated land use to avert environmental destruction. And the rise of central banking 
was a deliberate effort to manage the supply of money and credit to moderate the cycles of boom 
and bust. 
 In the late twentieth century, free-market utopianism undermined the government’s ability 
to manage and protect labor, land, and money. By playing off the deep fears of government-
induced unfreedom, it has once again blinded us to the freedoms and human capabilities that 
only government can ensure. As we discuss in Chapter 8, recognizing what Polanyi calls the 
reality of society is our hope for societal repair. 
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Notes 
 
1
 It would be ironic, indeed, if Hayek had been inspired to embrace utopianism after reading Karl 
Polanyi’s indictment of free market utopianism. But it is certainly possible, since Hayek studied 
the writings of his opponents on the left and Michael Polanyi, Karl’s brother, who had read GT 
in draft form, was in contact with Hayek and had attended the first Mont Pelerin meeting in 
1947. 
2
 This definition is from Dictionary.com which is based on the Random House Dictionary, 2013. 
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dystopia?s=t Accessed on Sept. 12, 2013. 
3
 As we note in Chapter 5, during Malthus’s lifetime and after, there was a major focus in 
England on emigration as the solution to the growth of population. 
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dystopia?s=t